Higher Education Pedagogy:
Learning from the creative practices
literature
(An antidote to teaching excellence metrics)
Prof Vicky Gunn
Production line:
Not a good metaphor for learning
http://www.lucentvisions.com/gallery/images/Idea%20Machine.jpg
What are your pedagogy research
passions?
How do we
foster deep
learning in our
disciplines?
Collaborative
learning in &
beyond the
university
Role of
technologies?
Reflective
praxis?
Resilience
in
/through
diversity?
The Question behind our teaching
passions
How do we improve student learning?
Where we’ve tended to look for
answers to the question
• Cognitive
psychology
• Sociology
Phenomenography
(Disembodied
phenomenology)
Common research-informed foci
Quality of
interaction with
peers and staff
Orientation to study
and learning
approaches
Self-efficacy and
resilience
Ability to adapt,
translate, transform
knowledge from
one context to
another
Intellectual
development and
information
processing
Dominant ‘proxy’ for pedagogic
effectiveness
Using teaching methods which support
sufficiency of understanding in the disciplinary
context to cultivate simultaneously:
• immediate subject area predetermined outcomes
• career-wide approaches to learning
Dominant judgement of best ‘way
of thinking’ at disciplinary level
Creativity and
originality within
the parameters
of the given
discipline
Sociological expression of
disciplinary originality
Emergence of innovation in disciplines
dependent on three elements:
• A culture that contains symbolic rules
• A person who brings novelty to the symbolic
domain
• A field of experts who recognize and
validate the innovation
Csikszentmihalyi, 1997, p.6
Disciplinary creativity and
originality
• Materialization of people’s passions as
excitatory charge of disciplines
• The social commodity of what academics
do
• Anticipatory temptation for some of our
students
Three threads
• There’s more to teaching than is currently
supplied by our research on it
• Disciplinary creativity and originality can be
a focus of teaching
• Increasingly unbalanced weight given to
particular types of thinking over doing &
making in undergraduate programmes
Different conceptualisations of
originality and creativity in the
disciplines
Artist
Designer
Maker
Maker / Artist
“Innovation requires thinking and doing at the same
time about things we haven’t imagined yet.”
Sharma, 2013, p. 242
Activity in the space of the unthought, the ‘not theory’
(Borgdorff, 2012);
Ludic experimentalism & singularity
Designer
“Creativity might be better understood as a
process and a feeling.”
Gauntlett, 2011, p. 7
“The design process thus can be viewed as a
creative means for designing a new reality.”
….with the outcome being both novel and
appropriately useful
Chang et al, 2015, p. 372
NB Creativity in Art & Design not
the same within or across these
areas
Foresight of a maker – “lies not in the
cogitation that literally comes before
sight but in the very activity of seeing
forward, not in preconception but in
anticipation”
Ingold, 2013, p. 69; Sennett, 2008, p. 175
And my point?
Each of these conceptualizations is
made active through teaching
regimes in Art Schools
And students materialize meaningmaking in these regimes
Dimensions & realms of
learning via Studio
Realms:
Reasoning
(logic)
Sensing
(aesthetics &
affect)
Playing
& connecting
(method)
Reasoning
http://www.creativitypost.com/images/made/images/uploads/science/iStock_
000019723630Small_610_300_s_c1_center_center.jpg
Genesis of Creativity as part of a
‘method’ in Art & Design?
Pre-discursive
Practices
Inductive
(Borgdorff, 2012)
Deductive
Abductive
‘speculative pragmatism’
(Manning & Massum, 2014; Sharma,
2013)
So what?
• Pre-configured
• Configuring
How much of our
teaching supports
student engagement
with these?
• Configured expression of physical,
material, ideas as well as evaluation
within a cultural context
Feeling like this yet?
Problem of Constructive Alignment
and Phenomenography
• Both start at inductive part of the method
• Focus student learning on identifying
appropriate salience almost exclusively
(Entwistle, 2005, p. 4)
• Doesn’t tell us about what fosters creativity
either in disciplinary terms or Art & Design
terms
Sensing, Aesthetics & Affect
Missing in the HE literature on
teaching:
• What leans us towards or away from objects of
study? How does this relate to what we discern and
feel and, from them, teach?
• How does this change the way we making sense of
our students’ learning?
• How do the spaces, objects, and immaterial in
which our teaching occurs influence how we
teach?
Playing, experimenting,
connecting
• Genesis point of originality in
the disciplines
• Embodied as well as
cerebral
• Encourages links of the
seemingly irrelevant to the
topics of the discipline
Implications for curriculum:
Our brief
• Curriculum Mapping for reasoning, aesthetics, &
playful experimentation
• Creating progressive, assessable opportunities for
pre-discursive & abductive reasoning
• Disorienting student expectations by disrupting
typical teaching approaches
• Encouraging meaning-making as revelation
through making
Why bother?
• Fuelling originality in the disciplines
• Revitalizing disciplinary content and methods
• Challenging students’ intellectual
instrumentalism
• Supporting development of creative agency
• Fighting back against metricization of
teaching excellence….